Pendleton to install surveillance cameras around town

Richard Cockle/The OregonianStacy Hall's standard poodle runs ahead of her and her miniature poodle on Pendleton's River Parkway, where the city will install surveillance cameras. Hall, 49, walks her dogs on the parkway daily and says she's never had a problem. Most residents like the plan.

PENDLETON -- Tip back your Stetson and smile the next time you're in Pendleton: You might be on camera.

The city known for cowboys, wheat and an independent spirit is about to become one of the few in Oregon to install surveillance cameras monitored by police.

While cameras have been in banks, convenience stores, airports and school buses for years, city-run systems -- common across England -- are rare in Oregon, especially in rural areas. But despite the specter of "1984"-style government monitoring, the system has stirred little debate among Pendleton's 17,000 residents.

Ten or so cameras will be installed by October, said Glenn Graham, the city staffer charged with setting up the system. The cameras will be wireless, so they can be moved among the city's 40-foot utility poles.

To start, four or five will be placed along the River Parkway, a 3 1/2-mile-long path along the Umatilla River that links the city's west end with downtown and the Pendleton Round-Up rodeo grounds, and three or four will be in the downtown business district.

The city library also will get at least one camera, said director Kat Davis, though she said it hasn't been decided whether that one will be monitored by police or library employees.

Authorities are watching

Pendleton won't be the only Oregon place with surveillance cameras. Other examples:

Hermiston: The city uses cameras more to manage traffic than to enforce laws. Police recently captured a fatal traffic accident on video.

Interstate 84: About 30 surveillance cameras are scattered from Pendleton to Boardman, monitored by the sheriffs of Umatilla and Morrow counties, city police chiefs and federal emergency management agencies. With computers in police cruisers, users can turn the cameras 360 degrees and zoom in and out, said Fred Ziari of EZ Wireless, developer of the system. The cameras are part of a wireless computer network developed since 2002 to connect first responders should an emergency occur at the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot. Lethal nerve and mustard gas has been stored at the depot for years awaiting incineration.

Pilot Rock: The logging, ranching and sawmill town south of Pendleton has four cameras -- to monitor a city park, watch Main Street and monitor the back door of the police department. Police Chief Darren Richman monitors them from his office.

Portland: Police don't have surveillance cameras, unlike those in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. But cameras record people boarding TriMet buses and MAX trains.

--Richard Cockle

The first camera -- and the only one expected to have public Internet access -- will be installed in June at a new skate park. Residents, Graham said, will be able to make sure their kids are behaving.

Mostly, though, the system will enable police officers to keep an eye on things using their patrol-car consoles, Police Chief Stuart Roberts said.

Pendleton has 23 officers, a force that hasn't grown since 1972, when the population was slightly more than 13,000, he said. The town is roughly 28th in population in Oregon, he said, but ninth in overall requests for police services and 12th in calls answered each year per officer.

Part of that is because the city has a state prison, a county jail and various mental health services that serve eastern Oregon, he said, bringing people to town who sometimes run out of cash and have no way to return home.

"Technology is the most viable way of expanding your resources," he said.

The cameras will enable officers to check for criminal activity in homeless camps along the parkway, for example, or look ahead en route to an emergency call. They'll also be able to check video archives for evidence in investigations, Roberts said.

The parkway, in particular, attracts vandalism, drug use, illegal drinking and homeless camps, he said, and thick foliage makes it difficult to patrol, putting joggers, bicyclists, picnickers and dog walkers at risk. He added that officers will be able to change the cameras' angles from their cars, reducing the need to drive down the parkway.

Grants and city funds will pay for the $180,000 system, Roberts said.

Dave Fidanque, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, questioned the effectiveness of such a system.

"In most cases, surveillance cameras do not make a difference in preventing crime in public places," he said, noting that cameras haven't stopped bank and convenience store robberies.

On the privacy issue, he said, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects citizens against invasion of privacy only when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place. That, he said, doesn't apply in public places. "The United States is moving more and more into a total surveillance society," he said.

Roberts, however, said he won't tolerate inappropriate use of the cameras. "I am certainly in tune with the Big Brother component of it," he said. No one objected at an April 7 City Council hearing on the system, he said.

Jimmy Roberts, a sophomore at Pendleton High School and no relation to the chief, thinks the cameras could scare off out-of-town visitors to the Pendleton Round-Up each September, one of the city's main economic engines.

"What are they going to think?" he said. "You don't want to see cameras on 40-foot telephone poles."

But others think they're a good idea.

Welder Matt Richter, 49, said he has "no problem with the cameras." He uses the River Parkway to walk to and from work and said he saw a homeless man camping there all last winter. "They need to do something," he said. "It should be a safe place for people to walk and feel safe."

Renee Engelking, taking a break from a jog along the parkway this week, agreed.

"I've had problems walking at night, being bothered," said Engelking, a 22-year-old software programmer at Cayuse Technologies on the nearby Umatilla Indian Reservation. "It would make me feel safer."